


Sensory Overload

by DaIncredibleGG



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: A Pinch of Angst, F/M, Fluff, I got this dialogue the other day, Nick Valentine is too good for this world, Other, Robot Feels, Robot/Human Relationships, Short & Sweet, and now I am sad, robots need love too, too pure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5711668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaIncredibleGG/pseuds/DaIncredibleGG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You <em>think<em></em></em>, you <em>feel<em></em></em>... you're <em>more<em></em></em> than pretending, Nick."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sensory Overload

Her voice is a gun hammer. That’s how he knows she’s determined. She spits a line at her son’s kidnaper and fills him with lead. It’s vigilante justice, and it’s music to his ears. Then the metal melts to a molten tone, still the spitfire she was a moment ago, just more smooth. That’s how he knows she’s something else. But it’s the switch that he loves the most. That brief moment between that he’s never heard in anyone else. That pain he knows she’s hiding, just taking it day-by-day. That’s how he knows he’s in over his head. 

Her clothes always smell a little like smoke. She runs through enough of it when they're taking on the torments of the Commonwealth, and it sticks to her like dog fur to linens. But she knows it does. She'd adapted well enough to what her world had become since she climbed out of her glorified freezer, but there were still some things too extreme for her to ignore.The smoke is better than sweat and oil and dirt, she reasons, and there’s plenty of it to perfume her. She wishes she could just wash it off. He thinks it suits her just fine.

She goes to watch the sunrise. Every morning without fail, he watches her pry herself away from wherever they set up for the night, all ready to get the show on the road. “I’ll be back in a sec”, she says. It’s always more, and he has to pretend like he didn’t watch her slip away at the sound of her baby’s babbling, the sadness roll down her cheeks at a dead man's voice. It bothers him how often he finds himself questioning whether what he feels is coming from himself, or is coming from Nick. When he wants to go and comfort her, but hesitates every time, that feeling always gets just a smidge worse.

Then, one day, he admits it. He’d watched her watch the sunrise, smelled the smoke on her clothes, heard that smooth heat in her voice, and he can’t tell who’s making the decision to let this off his chest. All he knows is that he trusts her, and Nick likely would have too. She calls him bashful when he starts, and he’s fairly certain one of his fans is broken. He doesn’t hold back much. When he does it’s things that Nick couldn’t bear to repeat. She knows, like he knows about her holotape, but she stands opposite him and he could drown himself in everything he feels as he studies her, listening to every word he says, as naturally as breathing. It only serves to remind him that she doesn't pretend.

When he’s done, her eyes aren’t cast to the ground. They’re right on him, as she takes the hand that has been stripped of its synthetic skin, running her thumb over the sharpest edges. It's not her heat that he feels, seeping into the comfortably tempered metal. He feels a pulse; short bursts of electricity right into what counted as his bones, and for a second, he doesn’t feel like a machine, or like the man he’s been made to think he is. For that one fleeting speck of time, between him and her, he can't define the difference. 

"You _think_ , you _feel_... you're _more_ than pretending, Nick."

That’s when he realizes the searing truth of it. She’s supposed to be his femme fatale, but _she’s_  more. And all he has to do is lean in a little closer to make it official. Memories from a different time tell him that this might be a bad idea, that Nick had seen the pictures, and even he knew how this might turn out. Absolutely none of it makes him stop when she leans his way and he finally tastes her. Because who was he kidding? He had long been in overload, and resisting is something that he can't do.


End file.
